Recalling the Craze for a Game of Chance

WOODY ALLEN joked in “Annie Hall” that after he was thrown out of New York University for cheating on a metaphysics final, his mother, a “high-strung woman, locked herself in the bathroom and took an overdose of mah-jongg tiles.”

TABLE TALK Playing mah-jongg in the Catskills, about 1950. The game was introduced in America in the 1920s.

This illustrates not just the lengths to which a distraught Jewish mother might go to inflict guilt, but how much a staple mah-jongg was (and is) in Jewish-American life  up there with flanken, seltzer and schmaltz (at least in my family).

It is curious that this ancient Chinese table game, the invention of which is attributed to Confucius in 500 B.C. (yet the origin is really uncertain), would be such a smash among American Jews that it evolved into a Jewish game.

The craze, which began in the 1920s, was a novel form of entertainment for a new leisure class and paralleled a middle-class taste for Asian-style interior decoration as well as a “Jewish interest in Chinese food,” says Melissa Martens, the curator of “Project Mah Jongg,” an extensive exhibit opening at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on May 4 and continuing through December.

It promises to be a distinctive cultural examination of the game and an opportunity to intimately engage with the ritualistic aspects of mah-jongg, which is enjoying a resurgence through mah-jongg social groups and on the Web (like online mah-jongg solitaire).

Mah-jongg is a game of chance and skill similar to gin rummy, in which each of four players is dealt either 13 or 16 pictographic tiles of different suits. The players then take turns drawing and discarding tiles, with a goal of making four or five combinations of tiles, or melds, and one pair, or head. It was a favorite among Catskill resort habitués and played incessantly by Eastern European immigrant Jewish women in the 1930s.

Eddie Cantor sang the Billy Rose and Con Conrad song “Since Ma Is Playing Mah Jong” that, through racially insensitive lyrics about the Chinese, satirized the compulsive game-playing that frustrated neglected husbands.

Also called “the game of a hundred intelligences,” “the gift of heaven,” and negatively during World War II, “the new yellow peril,” mah-jongg was introduced in the United States around 1920 by the American businessman Joseph P. Babcock, who had lived in China and was fascinated with the exotic world that mah-jongg represented.

He started importing sets en masse around 1922, at which time he simplified the game for an American audience through his book “Rules for Playing the Genuine Chinese Game Mah-Jongg.”

“The game delighted players with its beautifully adorned tiles, associations with other lands and mysterious rules,” Ms. Martens says. Marketers often used the game’s cultural associations “to trigger fantasies and identities.”

The first sets were sold by Abercrombie & Fitch in New York and were so popular that the owner Ezra Fitch had representatives scour China for as many sets as could be found. Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers produced their own versions, and the latter published Babcock’s book.

The National Mah Jongg League was formed in 1937 by a group of German-Jewish women, inviting players to convene and standardize the rules. Today, Ms. Martens estimates this group has as many as 400,000 members.

The “Project Mah Jongg” exhibition, designed by Abbott Miller, a partner at Pentagram/New York, will be in the 1,000-square-foot hexagonal gallery of the pyramidlike Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park, and will include dozens of artifacts  scorecards, aprons, packages, tiles  chronicling both the commercial legacy and social history of the game.

To convey how mah-jongg is “a carrier of fantasy, identity and memory,” Ms. Martens requested that people with “photos or memories to share” send them to mahjongg@mjhnyc.org.

“Design will dictate the visual experience,” she said, and Mr. Miller has already developed an overall scheme that conflates traditional Asian and Jewish cultural references, which he calls “part Chinese, part synagogue modern.”

He described the formal aspects of the design as trying to “strike a sincere hybrid between the cultures. It’s important to me that it’s not jokey and filled with what I would call punch-line gestures, but that the approach to the design language incorporates layers of meaning and delivers a story.”

Mr. Miller, who has designed numerous art and culture exhibitions, including one at the Freud Museum in Vienna about the role of the couch in psychoanalysis, has no personal connection to mah-jongg. “But I really love the aesthetics of the game: the symbols and the materiality of the tiles,” he said, adding, “I gravitate to topics that have this kind of complexity and specificity.”

He said he accepted the project thinking that all of these aspects could be drawn out by the exhibition design, “and that I could riff on the sensibility of the game and its history through the forms and images within the exhibition.”

Mr. Miller’s design language, a hybrid of Chinese motifs and what he calls “suburban progressive,” includes bamboo trees and paper lanterns and the slatted bench by the designer George Nelson that represents the modern aesthetic.

Nonetheless, as Woody Allen’s joke implies, there are inevitable connotations regarding mah-jongg that could lead to stereotyping. “We are very sensitive to anything that seems like a stereotype,” Ms. Martens said, “and will unpack it so not to raise it to kitsch.” She added that Mr. Miller was not leaning toward chinoiserie or “playing things for cute typology,” but was instead “streamlining” the major graphic elements, making them transcend their vernacular.

Evidence of this is the typeface being used throughout: rather than the clichéd Bamboo or Chop Suey fonts (which look much as they sound, and can be found on some of the printed matter in the exhibit), Mr. Miller selected a ’20s vintage Machine Age face from Italy called Fregio Mecano. It looks something like joined dominoes.

“For me,” Mr. Miller said, “it’s a great meeting ground between the tile-based world of mah-jongg, but I also see in its forms the narrow stalks and segmentation of bamboo, as well as the rounded forms you can find in ’60s and ’70s synagogue architecture.”

The exhibits include the games and printed material, photographs of people (mostly women) playing and an audio component (echoing the clatter of plastic tiles and random chatting).

A mah-jongg game will be played in the middle of the gallery. Mr. Miller is also editing and designing an issue of the culture journal 2Wice in conjunction with the show and has invited the illustrators Bruce McCall, Maira Kalman and Christoph Niemann and the fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, who has drawn four different mah-jongg ensembles, to interpret the theme.

Mr. Miller finds the focus on the specific “totally thrilling,” adding, “My motto is ‘Good is in the details.’ ”

For Ms. Martens, the interactive “Project Mah Jongg” exhibition is meant to attract a mixed audience, but she speculates that it will be largely female, both older and younger  people who have experienced the game. Perhaps it will entice an entirely new generation, weary of video games, to become mah-jongg enthusiasts.

More Articles in
Arts »A version of this article appeared in print on March 18, 2010, on page F9 of the New York edition.